An implantable blood pump used as a mechanical circulatory support device or “MCSD” includes a pumping mechanism to move blood. The pumping mechanism may be a radial flow pump, such as the HVAD® Pump manufactured by HeartWare, Inc. in Miami Lakes, Fla., USA. The HVAD® Pump is further discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,512,013, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety. Alternatively, the pumping mechanism may be an axial flow pump, such as the MVAD® Pump, also manufactured by HeartWare, Inc., and the pumps described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,972,122, 8,007,254 and 8,419,609, the disclosures of which are also hereby incorporated herein in their entirety, or any other pump suitable for providing vascular assistance. In operation, the blood pump draws blood from a source such as the left ventricle or left atrium of a patient's heart and propels the blood into an artery such as the patient's ascending aorta. Due to the nature of the application, the pumping mechanism must be highly reliable. Patient comfort is also a significant consideration. In addition to the pumping mechanism, the device may include a controller and the drive electronics for the pumping mechanism. The controller and drive electronics may receive power from an external power source. That power may be used to drive the pumping mechanism.
The control circuit may be configured to monitor operation of the blood pump. Such monitoring may be performed during power-up and afterwards. The monitoring may involve collecting data for measuring, estimating, calculating or otherwise determining operational parameters of the pump (e.g., motor speed), operational parameters of the control circuit (e.g., mode of operation, power supplied to the motor), and/or physiological parameters of the patient (e.g., heart rate, blood flow rate). During such monitoring, if the control circuit detects an unwanted condition, such as an error in the operation of the pump, an error in the operation of the control circuit, the presence of an undesirable condition at the blood pump (e.g., a suction condition, high blood pressure condition), or the presence of an undesirable physiological condition of the patient (e.g., arrhythmia, thrombosis, cardiovascular accident), the control circuit may take action to address the undesirable condition, such as by providing an alert to the patient or to a clinician, or by control operation of a motor of the pump to attempt to clear or mitigate the undesirable condition. In some cases, the control circuit may be capable of predicting an upcoming or future undesirable condition based on the collected data.
The control circuit may further keep a log of the collected data. The logged data may be stored for later analysis, such as clinical interpretation of long-term changes or features in the collected data. For instance, lifestyle information about the patient (e.g., when the patient is more or less active) may be determined from blood flow estimations. For further example, a patient's risk of cardiovascular accident may be predicted using months to years of collected data from a control circuit, for instance, in the manners described in commonly owned and U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 62/249,601, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety.